Experience Design, Virtual Reality and Media Hybridization for the Digital Communication Inside Museums

Abstract

Experience design, both in real and in virtual museums, is very complex to be planned, even more when digital contents are juxtaposed to real collections. Researchers in this field, curators, creatives and software developers must work together in order to evolve towards a more efficient interconnection among visitors, collections and digital applications. This paper deals with such an interconnection, providing a theoretical background and practical guidelines, on the basis of museum studies and of the author’s research experience in this domain, supported by the results of surveys carried out on European museums visitors dealing with digital technologies. Media hybridization has a long and evolving tradition and it can contribute to transmit culture in engaging way to the public, respecting the scientific plausibility of contents. The choice of narrative structures and styles, as well as of interaction paradigms and technologies, is deeply conditioned by a series of factors that will be examined in detail. A general “direction” is needed to arouse in the visitor a feeling of confidence and trust, expectation and discovery that makes him/her feel at the center of an emotional and creative experience, of a progressive appropriation of meaning. Various typologies of experiences will be discussed and compared.

Enhancing museums' attractiveness through digitization: An investigation of Italian medium and large‐sized museums and cultural institutions

“…The adoption of an enabling approach in implementing digitization paves the way for an improvement of the accessibility to the cultural heritage and enacts a greater participation of relevant constituencies to value co‐creation, which are conducive to increased OA (Garcia Carrizosa et al, 2020). Furthermore, digitization augments the museums and cultural institutions' ability to merge their educational and transformational purposes with entertainment activities: this prompts richer and more meaningful exchanges with visitors (Pietroni, 2019) and improves the organizational appeal to current and prospective customers (Kargas et al, 2020).…”

“…Furthermore, digitization augments the museums and cultural institutions' ability to merge their educational and transformational purposes with entertainment activities: this prompts richer and more meaningful exchanges with visitors (Pietroni, 2019) and improves the organizational appeal to current and prospective customers (Kargas et al, 2020).…”

Accessibility, Natural User Interfaces and Interactions in Museums: The IntARSI Project

“…Our proposal is based on theoretical background and practical guidelines we have evolved along more than twenty years of research and concrete experience in museum studies and virtual heritage projects (communicative media for cultural heritage, new forms of storytelling and paradigms of interaction, user experience design), supported by the results of surveys carried out on thousands of European museums visitors [2][3][4][5][6].…”

“…This process of contextualization and attribution of meaning to the cultural heritage is therefore diachronic, evolving through various cycles of interaction, through variation and redundancy, and is different from era to era, from person to person. Many factors contribute to the design of a good experience within the exhibition pathway [4]:…”

Co-Design of a Playful Mixed Reality Installation: An Interactive Crane in the Museum of Marble Crafts

“…Nowadays visitors' position and movement can be tracked with great accuracy allowing for playful bodily interactions [6,7], animated content is projected and mapped to any physical surface or even in the air as a pseudo-hologram [8], and modern microcontrollers and sensors offer new interactive capabilities to physical objects [9]. As a result, novel playful installations have been created, and visitors find themselves in mixed-reality spaces, where physical and digital interactions are efficiently coupled [10].…”